Turkey's Many Disabled, Long Shunned by Society, Play New Role in Politics

Government failures to address the causes of disability or fix antiquated social services have left disabled Turks seemingly invisible. But a handful of organizers are pushing for change

A disabled soccer player belonging to a Turkish amputee football team gets ready for a practice session in Ankara. Reuters

ISTANBUL, Turkey -- It gives Şafak Pavey goosebumps to talk about it:
the thousands of disabled children in Turkey who live hidden from view,
out of sight of neighbors, of guests, of the community.

"When I
visit very poor houses in areas in Istanbul, or the Black sea or Izmir,"
said Pavey, 34, a newly-elected member of Turkey's parliament from the
country's main opposition party, who lost her left arm and leg in a
train accident, "in every other house, there is a disabled kid hidden in
the back garden. If I stay for long enough, for an hour or two, they
come out."

According to a 2002 government study, an estimated 8.5
million disabled people live in Turkey, at the time nearly 13 percent
of the population, which has since grown to 79 million people. But
walking around a major city like Istanbul, one would never know. The
disabled are kept sequestered at home, a source of shame for the family.
And how could someone with physical challenges navigate such a city
anyway, with its steep hills, busted-up sidewalks and crowded,
cobblestone streets?

The week before the elections, though,
Pavey and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the main opposition party
the Republican People's Party (CHP), met with nearly 2,500 disabled
voters and their families at a large rally on a sweltering Istanbul
morning at the Ataturk stadium in Bakirkoy, a middle-class neighborhood
by the airport. Dozens of people with visual, hearing and speech
impairments, the physically and mentally challenged, and elderly
citizens waved flags and lined up to shake Pavey's hand.

Pavey, who represents the Anatolian side of Istanbul, was one of 14 disabled candidates from her party
seeking to claim a seat in Turkey's 550-member parliament, although she
is running as a mainstream candidate, and not as part of a quota. The
ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) put forward 11 disabled
candidates on their lists of nominees, but many were lower down on the
party lists, decreasing their chances of actually winning a seat.

According
to Dikmen Bezmez, a sociology professor at Bahcesehir University who
researches disability in Turkey, politicians have figured out that
talking about disability is an easy way to score points with the Turkish
public.

"Politicians have discovered a field, which, compared to
some of the other issues high on the agenda, is not 'risky' at all," she
said. "The idea is it is a 'good' thing to 'help' disabled people,
even though in practice there are many cases of maltreatment."

Comparing
a disability to a stone thrown in water, Pavey noted that, for every
disabled person in Turkey, there are at least four people (often family
members) whose lives are deeply affected by its ripple effect. At least
33 million people, according to her logic, stand to benefit from
inclusive policies that reduce barriers to health care, education,
employment and the active participation they have so long been denied in
Turkish society. Currently, an estimated 98 percent of the disabled
rely on family members for care.

At the two-hour rally, the CHP
constituents enjoyed a hearty Turkish breakfast under tents shielding
them from a merciless sun. Sweet buns, olives and hard-boiled eggs,
tomatoes and cucumbers, honey, cheese and jams were served courtesy of
the party, and volunteers tramped back and forth across the grass
refilling plastic cups of hot, strong Turkish tea.

Campaign web ad for Şafak Pavey

Supporter
Ramazan Bag, 42, is blind, as are two of his three brothers. "We are
victims of kinship marriage," he explained. A university graduate in
philosophy ("I think, therefore I am," he said, before jokingly telling
me I'm beautiful), he is now married with two children and works as a
telephone operator.

He called Kılıçdaroğlu "a new hope for
Turkish people," citing his secular views and fear of "becoming Iran"
under the current Islamist government. He added that he objects to the
AKP's neoliberal economic policies.

"This form of capitalism is
very bad," he said. "I think we need a social state: more economic
development, more education, more employment." He earns 2000 Turkish
lira a month, approximately $1,268, but said he needs additional support
from the government.

"My life is more expensive than for other
people. Other people can go anywhere by walking, I must call a taxi,
and it is expensive." Currently, the state allocates a maximum of 292
lira per month for persons with disabilities in need of care, according
to a shadow report submitted to the United Nation's Committee on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in May of 2010. The report noted
that with these sums, "The only thing guaranteed is a life at the hunger
level."

In 2005, the AKP-led government adopted Turkey's first
Disability Law, part of its process of EU harmonization. (The law's
title uses an outdated word for disabled, Özürlüle, that translates
roughly to "defective," instead of a more contemporary term, engelliler,
which connotes barriers.) In 2007, Turkey signed the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Persons with Disabilities, ratifying it
in 2009. But a change in the classification system in 2006, from a
scale based on functionality to one that interprets disability very
literally, meant that many people no longer qualified for benefits they
had formerly received.

Bülent Küçükaslan, the founder of a website called The Disabled and Their Friends,
received thousands of complaints about the change on the site's
discussion forum. He recounted the story of a man he knows with polio,
who has been employed since 1990. Until 2006, he was considered 45
percent disabled, which would have enabled him to apply for early
retirement. After the change, his classification is below 40 percent,
barring him from early retirement. As a result, he will have to work an
extra 10 years.

The prevalence of disability in Turkey is roughly on par with other countries; in the United States, by some estimates, it's approximately 12 percent, and a new report
from the World Health Organization estimated that 15 percent of the
global population, or 1 billion people, are disabled. But Pavey says
that several of the causes -- particularly poor hygiene and kinship
marriage, a term for marriage between cousins or other members of the
same extended family --are relatively easy to target.

"Dust,"
she said simply, "particularly in the southeast. Dust is very basic,
but it makes kids turn blind at very early ages," something she has seen
from her work in refugee camps. Kinship marriage is another factor
that, so far, politicians and religious leaders have refused to address.

"It's
one of the biggest causes, and it's not being discussed in Turkey," she
said. "It's everywhere, yet it's almost a secret."

A disabled girl waves a flag at a CHP rally. Anna Sussman

"Every
Friday [when observant Muslims attend services at mosques] can be used
very effectively in this country, but they won't talk about it. Then
they claim these kids born out of these marriages are sinful and have to
be hidden."

Throughout her short campaign, she has heard variations of the same shocking sentiment repeated over and over again

"Families
with disabled children are praying for their kids to die before them,
because they have no support systems. They are very scared about who
will take care of their kids, and how their kids will have a dignified
life after they die," she said. "It doesn't matter if they vote for CHP
or not. They all pray for that."

Eric Rosenthal, the founder and
director of Disability Rights International, found similar sentiments
when researching a two-year investigation into conditions at Turkey's
mental health facilities, the findings of which he published in a 2005 report, "Behind Closed Doors."
The director of a private school for children with mental disabilities,
whose own daughter is disabled, told researchers, "I do not want her
ever to have to live in the institution."

After the report was
released, the AKP-led government halted some of the most egregious
violations that he and his colleagues had found, such as the use of
unmodified electroconvulsive therapy (commonly known as "shock
treatment"), a procedure that the European Committee for the Prevention
of Torture considers tantamount to torture. But other recommendations,
he said, went unheeded.

"For a very small investment of
resources, they could have closed down a lot of these places, and
integrated the people there," he said, instead of isolating them away
from the larger population. "Like at a run-down facility outside of
Ankara. But against all logic, they poured money into this crumbling
place and rebuilt it. They put a lot of money into doing the opposite of
the right thing."

Fatma Zengin works at Rusihak, a human rights
organization focusing on the rights of the mentally disabled. For the
past three years, she and her colleagues have been pressing the
government to adopt community-based mental health care. This year, the
government opened ten centers, but she says that those operating and
staffing the centers have little understanding of a rights-based
approach that includes disabled people themselves in decision-making
capacities. "They open centers, train staff, and give services, but they
don't ask them to participate on an equal and non-discriminative level
in the provision of these services," she said

According to Pavey,
this is no accident. She jokingly refers to the AKP as the "Party of
Concrete," due to their predilection for large (and lucrative)
construction projects.

Küçükaslan said he is deeply skeptical of all of Turkey's political parties, even the CHP.

"In
Turkey there is no single political party, nor is there any NGO, that
has put out a comprehensive policy on the problems of people with
disabilities and the discrimination they face," he said. "All of them
have a charity-based attitude."

This is something Pavey, who
worked for eight years for the United Nations on humanitarian and human
rights issues, hopes to change. As a member of Parliament, she hopes to
mainstream disability issues across ministries, rather than having a
separate office. The budget, she said, should come from the budget for
human rights.

But even at the CHP rally for disabled constituents, old prejudices remain.

Emre
Firat Yocip, a handsome, mute 20-year-old high school graduate, stopped
his breakfast to answer some of my questions with the assistance of a
sign language interpreter. Perhaps in her eagerness to help, the
interpreter answered several of my questions for Yocip without bothering
to ask him. Each time, I stopped her to ask if we could get his
response. And each time, when I looked up from my notebook, I saw him
smiling patiently, waving his hand at her, waiting to be heard.

This story was reported with a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting

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